How Do You Choose a CMS?

CMS stands for Content Management System, and a CMS is platform is used to optimize your customer’s digital experience. It facilitates content management on digital platforms like websites and blogs by allowing users to collaborate in the production and editing of digital content.

If you want to do things right and create an amazing digital experience for your customers, it is very important to choose the right CMS platform in the market.

When it comes to a content platform and all the CMS components you need, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. To get the right CMS platform, you must take into account your resources, the expertise of your team, and what you are looking to achieve from the CMS platform.

Once you are aware of what goals you are looking to achieve with your CMS platform and how much are you willing to spend on it, the next step is to do some market research. In this initial market research look for the different features offered by different CMS platforms and see which features align with your goals the best. Make a list of those features and determine which ones of those features are absolutely essential and which ones come under the category of additional features. 

One of the main advantages of a CMS is features to streamline, organize, and market content. The features that you find absolutely essential are the basic features according to your business needs. When choosing between different CMS platforms, it is okay to compromise on extra features but never compromise on the basic features.

Once you have narrowed down a list of CMS platforms based on their features, the next step is to compare the prices of your shortlisted options. When comparing the costs of different CMS platforms it is very important to beware of the hidden costs. The upfront cost of a CMS platform may be less than that of another but the additional costs can increase its average costs as compared to the other. The best is to calculate the average cost of each platform and then compare that cost with that of others.

If you are in the decision-making process of choosing a CMS, this section of the article will guide you by telling you the right way to approach the decision-making process. Following are the six steps that you should follow while going through that process:

Internal Input

Getting a CMS is not a small investment so it is best to approach the decision-making with all due deliberation to fully understand how your CMS will be used. There are multiple key stakeholders in an organization that is directly affected by such a decision. We advise you to formulate a committee for the purchase of the CMS and have each of the stakeholders give their take on how you should make the purchase and what factors you should be taking into account while doing it.

The marketing people will most likely drive your attention to the features essential for good content production and the IT people will be more concerned about the technical aspects of the CMS. Having taken the opinion of everyone you will be able to make the purchase with a balanced approach.

Evaluation of Needs

Don’t go for “cool” CMS features just because they are cool. For you, the only thing that is cool is what helps you fulfill your business needs and facilitates you in fulfilling your business goals. Some questions that you should ask yourself include:

• Is the CMS compatible with my company’s tech needs?
• Do I need to create a digital experience in multiple languages?
• Is the CMS compatible with the company’s future goals? 

Implementation Partner

If your company is not large enough or you just don’t have an in-house development team to help you choose the right CMS in line with your digital strategy, the best move is to hire an implementation partner. An implementation partner will not only help you choose the right CMS that fits your digital strategy but also provide you support in implementation. 

Finalize Contenders

It is best to choose a number of contenders and then choose the ones that are closest to your business needs. At this stage, you can consider factors like hidden costs and deployment time that you might have previously ignored when your main focus was finding the right features.

Write the Proposal

Writing a request for proposal to the selected vendors can bring a lot of clarity. In sending the request make sure that you have elaborated your requirements very clearly. The CMS is a product for the vendor and they will use this opportunity to sell that product to you as best as they can.

If you are not aware of your own requirements at this stage or if you haven’t done enough market research they might oversell using a clever play on words. Therefore, it is very important that when you are sending a request for proposal you know exactly what you need and also how much are you willing to invest.

The costs are different for advanced users, non-technical users, and business users. Make sure you are only paying for what you need.

Evaluate the Response

When you have sent the requests for proposals, each vendor will try to put their best foot forward. We will advise you to go for the vendor that is honest and clear in its dealings.

When choosing a CMS for your business it is very important to beware of the challenges, as even leading CMS platforms like WordPress can have disadvantages as well as advantages. We will strongly advise against buying a CMS that has high developer reliance. This will not only interfere with the efficiency of your team but will also require more technical expertise. The purpose of the CMS should be to make things easier for you, not difficult.

Apart from that, an important issue is the hidden costs. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring the hidden costs. Instead of only focusing on the upfront cost, it is best to take into account the additional costs of the CMS as well and also compare the costs of different packages and see if the deal you are getting is worth the money.

Look for the following qualities in order to evaluate a CMS:

• Security

A CMS is a storehouse of data and can create a lot of sensitive information about your business. Thus it is very important that the platform be completely secure and password protected.

• Web Standards

The CMS you are using must make it easier for you to follow the web standards and compliance practices so that you don’t have to waste your energy worrying about these things.

• Optimization

If your CMS is not optimized for performance and speed, it can ruin the customer experience. Your CMS must support and facilitate the quick loading of all the web pages.

• Tech Knowledge

If you do not have the resources to hire a special tech team and are more design-oriented then make sure that your CMS is such that it does not require its users to have a lot of programming knowledge and can be used easily by your design team.

• Flexibility

A good CMS platform is one that is flexible and allows for the easy customization of web pages. You also want to make sure that your CMS is capable to adapt to your long-term growth goals so that you do not have to face any interruption in scaling your business.

What are the six features you have to look for while choosing a suitable CMS in the market list them out?

• Developer Reliance

Your CMS platform should be able to increase the efficiency of your business and not decrease it. A CMS that has a high developer reliance should be avoided at all costs if you wish your business processes to run smoothly. Your team should have better things to focus on.

• Scalability 

It is as important as it is obvious. If you really want to hit your growth goals the right way then you cannot afford to stop in the way. A CMS platform that has room for scalability will ensure that you can easily reach your expansion goals without any wait or major transition.

• Omnichannel Support 

It doesn’t matter if you are currently only running a desktop site, your CMS system must offer you omnichannel support. Having omnichannel support will keep your avenues open and help you expand to more options in the future.

• The Right Support System

When getting a CMS be sure to check out the support services offered by the vendor. Even if you have a world-class technological team at your organization, it is best to have support offered by the vendor when making software purchases. This can save you from a lot of future trouble.

• The Right User Interface

When it comes to selecting the right user interface, simplicity is the best option. The simpler the user interface the better your team will be able to navigate through it and the more efficient will the workflow be.

• APIs and Supports Integrations

Having APIs and support integration in your CMS will help you create an awesome digital experience for your customers more easily. This will allow your tech team to integrate with what else is available in the market and bring about innovative solutions.

As more and more businesses are turning digital and taking a digital-first approach, it has become very important to stand out by transforming the digital experience for customers in a good way. A good CMS platform is one that lets you adapt your content and the presentation of your digital platform to the changing needs of the time.

There are several extremely important things that you must keep in mind while choosing a CMS. They are as follows:

Personalization: Gone are the days when businesses were all about delivering the right product or service. The customers of the present-day demand more than that; they demand an experience. The CMS platform you are using should be such that it consolidates customers’ interactions with the business so that the businesses can stay aware of the preferences of the customers and create a digital experience for them that is perfectly in line with their preferences.

Gartner Predicts 80% of Marketers Will Abandon Personalization Efforts by 2025. 

Of course, there is that other 20% who will persist and hopefully do well.

Running an outdated site can have an immediate adverse effect on your business and not having the right CMS can contribute to it.

According to a report by Sucuri, 90% of infected sites in 2019 were running an outdated version of the Joomla software. Sucuri's 2019 analysis of hacked websites, 87% of Magento websites were out of date at the point of infection.

Having the right CMS and a dedicated tech and design team can help you avoid countless problems of the sort. 

Globalization: This consideration is very important for businesses that are either already operating globally or plan to expand to the international market. An increased client base means increased diversity and that translates to varying needs.

When you are operating in such a vast space it can be difficult to find a standardized experience that will work for all. This gives rise to the need of creating localized experiences for different areas. A robust CMS platform that gives you the ability to offer content in different languages and makes it easy to streamline content with translators will be a wise choice.

Rapid Change: Every day sees a new advancement in technology. With the development of artificial intelligence and the internet of things, people are increasingly incorporating new devices into their lives. All these devices are a source of data. Having a Content Management System platform that has the ability to adapt to the new technology will make sure that you are able to make use of all this data and stay ahead of your competitors in creating a wonderful digital experience for the customers.

Understanding Data: Just having access to data is not enough. To make the tremendous amount of data that you have access to useful, you must have the ability to understand what that data means. A CMS platform with a powerful analytics tool can help you do just that.

The analytics is a feature of a CMS platform that enables you to decipher the data and use it to understand how your audience is engaging with content and what is motivating them to engage with it. The knowledge of these things will help you in creating a more personalized digital experience for your customers and let you know which areas you need to work on.

Relevance of Content: Static websites are now a thing of the past. Customers demand interaction. Even from the technology, they demand a human experience. They want to be seen, catered to, and understood. Your CMS should allow you to create such an experience for your customers all through their buying journey.

Following are some of the issues that can keep you from making the best use of CMS and it’s important to consider them:

• Customization

A good CMS should allow you to customize things like meta tags, titles, and headings as independent elements. And ideally there should be no character limit for them. 

Along with customization, there should also be the option of auto-filling these fields so that the process can be automatized when needed.

• Drop-Down Navigation Menu

Drop-down navigation menu is an important part of your website and helps a great deal in SEO optimization. Make sure that your built-in menus are built using CSS and not JavaScript as most search engines including Google have trouble indexing the drop-down menus that are not built-in CSS.

• Structure of the URL

URL is no less important than the content. We will advise you to use your CMS to create SEO-friendly URLs. The best option is to create keyword specific URL pathways to avoid duplication of content.

• Redirects

Make sure that your CMS only give 301 redirects and not the 302 redirects. The 302 redirects create the problem of the duplication of content while the 301 redirects ensure the redirection from the old URL to the new URL.

• Pagination

It is very important that your CMS supports the rel=next and rel=prev tags. These tags will help your users navigate through multiple product pages when you have a wide range of products belonging to the same category.

At the end of the day, the best CMS for you is not the one with the most advanced features or extra functionality, but it is the one that sits right with your business needs. Remember the goal of having a Content Management System is to make the process of content management easier and not to make it complicated. Your best bet is a CMS platform that helps YOUR business in the right way.